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From: Robert Treat <[email protected]>
To: David G. Johnston <[email protected]>
Cc: Jianghua Yang <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [PATCH] initdb: Treat empty -U argument as unset username
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2025 00:31:05 -0400
Message-ID: <CABV9wwOOpOijL9sY03KV3WNvgMxVFsyfvfYbfy2MYfn40z0yyQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAKFQuwaCPkb8=2_V3121Ei0MBrg02FLRNQbcAcyzCO3dAha=Gw@mail.gmail.com>
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	<CAKFQuwbVK=oANp9XLdQknd7o9jJOUFQanUtG3QAh-3kuaM5tJw@mail.gmail.com>
	<CAAZLFmSKrcovMSauueWg=8VdZN-fHPH2ZengZRKA8AfgST6o6w@mail.gmail.com>
	<CAKFQuwaCPkb8=2_V3121Ei0MBrg02FLRNQbcAcyzCO3dAha=Gw@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Jul 2, 2025 at 12:01 AM David G. Johnston
<[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 1, 2025 at 8:31 PM Jianghua Yang <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> git show 8e673801262c66af4a54837f63ff596407835c20
>>
>>
>>         effective_user = get_id();
>>
>> -       if (strlen(username) == 0)
>>
>> +       if (!username)
>>
>>                 username = effective_user;
>>
>>
>> The previous code already intended to treat a missing username as falling back to the system user.
>> The check was changed from strlen(username) == 0 to !username, but this inadvertently stopped handling the empty-string case. This patch restores the original intent and makes the behavior consistent.
>>>
>>>
>
> At this point I'd rather take advantage of this behaveing in the "doesn't work" category for the past 8 years, and thus all supported releases, and not change existing behavior (just improve the error message) rather than accept original intent.  Also, the amount of things it has to be consistent with is quite small and I'm pytr sure that some of those are also broken - encoding/pgdata/textsearch all exhibit the same pattern (xlog is the reverse so maybe ok...)
>

FWIW, I tend to agree with David; I feel like if a user passes in -U,
there was probably a reason, and a good error message would be more
useful in clarifying things rather than blindly pushing forward with
potentially the wrong thing.


Robert Treat
https://xzilla.net

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